Recent Books

Hoods Landing

By Laura Vincent

April 2, 2026

In the rural reaches of Auckland, the women of the eclectic Gordon family gather for Christmas. They may push each other’s buttons, but know precisely when to offer tea (or a tipple). Rita, the 50-year-old baby of the family, is planning to tell them she has cancer. Drifting between past and present, she considers the lives of women in their community and reckons with what it all means for her future and her family.

Featuring elderly lesbians, twins who aren’t twins, and several dogs named Roger, Hoods Landing is about shoddy pasts, ambiguous futures and the imperfect bonds that tie family together.

*Shortlisted for the 2026 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction

Brawler

By Lauren Groff

April 2, 2026

Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region – from New England to Florida to California – these nine stories reflect and expand upon a single shared theme: the ceaseless battle between the dark and light in all of us.

Among those caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling; a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult; a mother blinded by the loss of her family; and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by human fallibility, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.

Precise, surprising and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated fracture points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and survival. It is a timeless, stunning achievement from one of the very best short story writers working today.

An Idle Woman

By Wendy Parkins

April 2, 2026

1838, England: When eighteen-year-old Frances Dickinson impulsively marries Lieutenant John Geils, all her hopes for her future are quickly shattered as she finds there is much about her husband she did not know. A cruel and violent man, John keeps Frances in isolation on his family’s estate, while spending her fortune and preying upon their maids.

Frances yearns to break free from her marriage but the law is not on her side. Only when John’s abuse escalates can she set in motion a daring plan to secure her freedom.

A story of gaslighting, control and one woman’s fight, An Idle Woman is the true story behind one of the most sensational divorce trials of the nineteenth century.

Son of Nobody

By Yarnn Martel

April 2, 2026

Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. Though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada, this is the kind of career break he desperately needs.

In the depths of the Bodleian Library, Harlow discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilization itself. He names the epic poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea but known to all as ‘son of nobody’.

As sole translator and interpreter of the Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its modern footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears. Despite the three-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition and grief.

Heart Lamp

By Banu Mushtaq

April 2, 2026

In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Published originally in the Kannada language between 1990 and 2023, praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions testify to Mushtaq’s years as a journalist and lawyer, in which she tirelessly championed women’s rights and protested all forms of caste and religious oppression.

Written in a style at once witty, vivid, colloquial, moving and excoriating, it’s in her characters—the sparky children, the audacious grandmothers, the buffoonish maulvis and thug brothers, the oft-hapless husbands, and the mothers above all, surviving their feelings at great cost—that Mushtaq emerges as an astonishing writer and observer of human nature, building disconcerting emotional heights out of a rich spoken style. Her opus has garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well as India’s most prestigious literary awards; this is a collection sure to be read for years to come.

The Black Monk

By Charlotte Grimshaw

March 4, 2026

A woman haunted by family denial, secrets and a shadowy figure . . .

While her brother Cedric spirals into addiction, Alice Lidell finds herself confronted not only by his decline, but by memories of the past. From their chaotic Auckland childhood to her present day life, Alice is haunted by a mysterious figure she calls the Black Monk.

As Alice tries to hold her family together, the Black Monk appears in various guises: a stranger met in a cemetery, a face on television, a character surfacing in her own writing.

Part psychological thriller, part family saga, this is a daring novel that examines the themes of the moment: shame, addiction, truth and the stories we tell to survive.

Lost Lambs

By Madeline Cash

March 4, 2026

For the three Flynn daughters, it’s been disastrous since their parents opened up their marriage. Abigail, the eldest, is dating an ex-soldier several years her senior nicknamed ‘War Crimes Wes’. Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist. And the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to a wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone – or something – is monitoring the town’s citizens.

Casting a shadow across their lives is Paul Alabaster, a nefarious local billionaire. Rumours of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with Alabaster’s machinations sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy – one that may just, finally, bring them closer together.

McGlue

By Ottessa Moshfegh

March 4, 2026

They said I’ve done something wrong?… And they’ve just left me down here to starve. Haven’t had a drop in days more so…

Salem, Massachusetts, 1851: McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of his name or situation or orientation – he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Now, McGlue wants one thing and one thing only: a drink. Because for McGlue, insufferable, terrifying memories accompany sobriety. Asail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us an unforgettable blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.

Party Boy

By Breton Dukes

March 4, 2026

Marco is stressed. On one hand, he’s a cook in a progressive city bar, a married father of three, doing all he can to raise his boys right. On the other (slightly burnt) hand, his life is chaos. Every day seems full of cruel and unusual obstacles, from temperamental arancini to a car breakdown at the worst possible time. Painkillers and booze can only do so much to protect him from the fallout of his adolescence – the bullying, the fear, the things that were done to him and the things he did.

Now his fiftieth birthday is approaching, and all the ghosts of his life are invited to the party. It feels like his last chance, though he isn’t sure for what.

Such a Perfect Family

By Nalini Singh

March 3, 2026

Love at first sight, a whirlwind Vegas wedding, a fairy-tale romance.

For seventy-nine days, Tavish Advani has been the happiest man in the world-until his new life turns to ash, his wealthy in-laws’ house going up in a fiery explosion. His badly injured wife lies in a coma, her family all but annihilated.

Tavish thought he left the sins of his Los Angeles life behind, but it’s not so easy to leave behind an investigation into the deaths of several high-profile women-all of whom he professed to love. Tragedy and death follow him no matter where he goes . . . but this time, he knows he’s innocent.

Desperately trying to clear his name as the authorities zero in, he begins his own investigation into the fire-and learns that his wife’s picture-perfect family may have been nothing but a meticulously constructed mirage. The truth is much darker than anything Tavish could’ve imagined . . .